Ayushmann Khurrana and Vaani Kapoor-starrer Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui has recorded a decent start at the box office with a collection of over Rs 12 crore (nett) over the first weekend, as per a Box Office India report.
The film collected around 3.25 crore on Friday, the first day of release, and slowly picked up over the weekend and collected around 4.25 crore and 4.75 crore on Saturday and Sunday respectively. According to the report, the collections did improve during the weekend but business in major circuits like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh remained dull.
The film also could not perform very well in the Punjab circuit and saw Gurgaon and Chandigarh raking in 45% of the collections while other places failed to record decent footfall. On Monday as well, the film only collected around 1.75 crore (nett) taking the total collection to somewhere around 14 crore (nett), BOI reported.
Collections for recent releases like Antim: The Final Truth and Tadap have also shown a slow-growth trend. The Akshay Kumar-starrer Sooryavanshi has been the only post-pandemic Hindi film that performed extremely well and has gone on to collect almost 200 crore (nett). Marvel Studios’ Spider-Man: No Way Home, meanwhile might become one of the biggest post-pandemic films in terms of advance collections in India.
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Directed by Abhishek Kapoor, Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui revolves around Manu, a bodybuilder from Chandigarh (played by Khurrana) who falls in love with Maanvi (played by Kapoor), a Zumba teacher, who reveals that she is a trans woman. While the film has opened to good reviews, ahead of its release, the makers had come under fire for casting Kapoor, a cis heterosexual woman, over a trans woman. The film was also called out for transphobia and trans erasure. Several activists had highlighted that Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui is an example of the Hindi film industry’s long history of the stereotypical portrayal of members of the LGBTQIA+ community.